Perhaps taking two disparate assertions, one tacit and one spoken, completely out of their original contexts and re-mixing and re-applying them to a different set of circumstances can be a helpful means to introduce an emerging and potentially prosperous new trend.

First, someone I know has a relatively smart and empathetic dog who will tilt his head from side to side if you ask him (the dog) something that sounds like a question. His owner claims that this is his dog’s way of non-verbally communicating – – to paraphrase (or parabark, maybe) – – something to the effect of “You know, you’re right. I never really thought if it that way”. Second, in an article in the January 4, 2019 edition of The New York Times entitled The Week in Tech: Amazon’s Burning Problems, by David Streitfeld, there is an amusing quote from a writer for WIRED named Craig Mod describing his 2018 Amazon Kindle Oasis as being “about as interactive as a potato”.

So, let’s take some literary license (and, of course, the dog’s license, too), and conflate these two communications in order to paws here to examine the burgeoning commercial a-peel of the rich business data now being generated by augmented reality (AR) systems.

To begin, let’s look no further than the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held last month in Las Vegas. New offerings of AR products and services were all the rage among a number of other cutting-edge technologies and products being displayed, demo-ed and discussed.¹ As demonstrably shown at this massive industry confab, these quickly evolving AR systems that assemble and present a data-infused overlay upon a user’s real-world line of sight, are finding a compelling array of versatile applications in a widening spectrum of industries. So, too, like everything else in today’s hyper-connected world, AR likewise generates waves of data that can be captured, analyzed and leveraged for the benefit and potential profit of many commercial enterprises.

A close and compelling examination of this phenomenon was recently posted in an article entitled Unlocking the Value of Augmented Reality Data, by Joe Biron and Jonathan Lang, on the MIT Sloan Management Review site on December 20, 2018. I highly recommend a click-through and full read if you have an opportunity. I will try to summarize and annotate this piece and, well, augment it with some of my own questions.

[The Subway Fold category of Virtual and Augmented Reality has been tracking a sampling of developments in this area in commerce, academia and the arts for the past several years.]

Image from Pixabay.com

Uncensored Sensors

Prior to the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), it was humans who mostly performed the functions of certain specialized sensors in tasks such as detecting environment changes and then transmitting their findings. Currently, as AR systems are increasingly deployed, people will be equipped with phones and headsets, among other devices, embedded with these sensing capabilities. This “provides uncharted opportunities for organizations” to make use of the resulting AR data-enabled analyses to increase their “operational effectiveness” and distinguish the offerings of their goods and services to the consumer public.

AR’s market in 2019 is analogous to where the IoT market was in 2010, garnering significant buzz and demonstrating “early value for new capabilities”. This technology’s capacity to “visualize, instruct, and interact” can become transformative in data usage and analytics. (See Why Every Organization Needs an Augmented Reality Strategy, by Michael E. Porter and James Heppelman, Harvard Business Review, November – December 2017.)

To thereby take advantage of AR, businesses should currently be concentrating on the following questions:

How best to plan to optimize and apply AR-generated data?

How to create improved “products and processes” based upon AR users’ feedback?

Image from Pixabay.com

AR Systems Generate Expanding Spheres of User Data

Looking again to the past for guidance today, with the introduction of the iPhone and Android phones in 2007 and 2008, these tech industry turning points produced “significant data about how customers engaged with their brand”. This time period further provided engineers with a deeper understanding of user requirements. Next, this inverted the value proposition such that “applications could sense and measure” consumer experiences as they occurred.

Empowered with comparable “sensing capabilities emerging through the IoT”, manufacturers promptly added connectivity, thus generating the emergence of smart, connected products (SCPs). These new devices now comprise much of the IoT. The resulting massive data collection infrastructure and the corresponding data economy have been “disrupting technology laggards ever since”.

Moreover, using “AR-as-a-sensor” for gathering deep quantities of data holds significant potential advantages. Many AR-enabled devices are already embedded with sensing capabilities including “cameras, GPS, Bluetooth, infrared and accelerometers”. More organically, they also unleash human “creativity, intuition and experience” that cannot be otherwise replicated by the current states of hardware and software.²

What can humans with AR-based devices provide to enhance their experiences? New types of data and “behavioral insights” can be harvested from both SCPs and unconnected products. For example, in the case of an unconnected product, a user with a device equipped to operate as a form of AR-as-a-sensor could examine how the product is used and what are the accompanying user preferences for it. For an SCP, the AR-equipped user could examine how usage affects performance and whether the product is adaptable to that particular user’s purposes.

For additionally needed critical context, it is indeed “human interaction” that provides insights into how SCPs and unconnected devices are realistically operating, performing and adapting.

“Rainbow Drops”, Image by Mrs. eNil

Evaluating Potential Business Benefits from AR-Derived Data

This new quantum of AR information further creates a form of feedback loop whereby questions concerning a product’s usage and customization can be assessed. This customer data has become central to “business strategy in the new digital economy”.

These are deployed in information management operations to process unrefined AR data into “value-rich knowledge and insights”. By then porting the resulting insights into engineering systems, businesses can enhance their “product portfolio, design and features” in previously unseen ways.

AR data troves can also be merged with IoT-generated data from SCPs to support added context and insights. For unconnected devices or digital-only offerings, humans using AR to interact with them can themselves become sensors similarly providing new perspectives on a product’s:

Service usage

Quality

Optimization of the “user experience and value”

“DSC_445”, Image by Frank Cundiff

Preliminary Use Cases

The following are emerging categories and early examples of how companies are capturing and leveraging AR-generated data:

Expert Knowledge Transfer:Honeywell is gathering data from experienced employees and then enhancing their collective knowledge to thereafter be transferred to new hires. The company has implemented this by “digitizing knowledge” about their products only made visible through experience. This enables them to better understand their products in entirely new ways. Further details of this initiative is presented on the firm’s website in a feature, photos and a video entitled How Augmented Reality is Revolutionizing Job Training.

Voice of the Product: Bicycle manufacturer Cannondale is now shipping their high-end products with an AR phone app to assist owners and bike shop mechanics with details and repairs. This is intended to add a new dimension to bike ownership by joining its physical and digital components. The company can also use this app to collect anonymized data to derive their products’ “voice”. This will consequently provide them with highly informative data on which “features and procedures” are being used the most by cyclists which can then be analyzed to improve their biking experiences. For additional information about their products and the accompanying AR app, see Cannondale Habit Ready to Shred with All-New Proportional Response Design, posted on Bikerumor.com on October 9, 2018. There is also a brief preview of the app on YouTube.

Personalized Services: AR is being promoted as “transformative” to online and offline commerce since it enables potential buyers to virtually try something out before they buy it. For instance, Amazon’s new Echo Look permits customers to do this with clothing purchases. (See Amazon’s Echo Look Fashion Camera is Now Available to Everyone in the US, by Chris Welch, posted on TheVerge.com on June 6, 2018.) The company also patented something called “Magic Mirror” in January 2018. When this is combined with Echo Look will point the way towards the next evolution of the functionality of the clothing store dressing room. (See Amazon’s Blended-Reality Mirror Shows You Wearing Virtual Clothes in Virtual Locales, by Alan Boyle, posted on GeekWire.com on January 2, 2018.) The data collected by Echo Look is “being analyzed to create user preference profiles” and, in turn, suggest purchases based upon them. It is reasonably conceivable that combining these two technologies to supplement such personalized clothing recommendations will produce additional AR-based data, elevating “personalized services and experiences” to a heretofore unattained level.³

Quality Control: For quite a while, DHL has been a corporate leader in integrating AR technology into its workers’ daily operations. In one instance, the company is using computer vision to perform bar code scanning. They are further using this system to gather and analyze quality assurance data. This enables them to assess how workers’ behavior “may affect order quality and process efficiency”. (See the in-depth report on the company’s website entitled Augmented Reality in Logistics, by Holger Glockner, Kai Jannek, Johannes Mahn and Björn Theis, posted in 2014.)

Image from Pixabay.com

Integrating Strategic Applications of AR-Derived Data

There is clearly a range of meaningful impacts upon business strategies to be conferred by AR-derived data. Besides the four positive examples above, other companies are likewise running comparable projects. However, some of them may likely remain constrained from wider exposure because of “technological or organizational” impediments.

With the emergence of AR-generated data resources, those firms that meaningfully integrate them with other established business data systems such as customer relationship management (CRM) and “digital engagement”, will yield tangible new insights and commercial opportunities. Thus, in order to fully leverage these potential new possibilities, nimble business strategists should establish dedicated multi-departmental teams to pursue these future benefits.

My Questions

Because the datastreams from AR are visually based, could this be yet another fertile area to apply machine learning and other aspects of artificial intelligence?

What other existing data collection and analysis fields might also potentially benefit from the addition of AR-derived data stream? What about data-driven professional and amateur sports, certain specialties of medical practice such as surgery and radiology, and governmental agencies such as those responsible for the environment and real estate usage?

What entrepreneurial opportunities might exist for creating new AR analytical tools, platforms and hardware, as well as integration services with other streams of data to produce original new products and services?

What completely new types of career opportunities and job descriptions might be generated by the growth of the AR-as-a-sensor sector of the economy? Should universities consider adding AR data analytics to their curriculum?

What data privacy and security issues may emerge here and how might they be different from existing concerns and regulations? How would AR-generated data be treated under the GDPR? Whether and how should people be informed in advance and their consent sought if AR data is being gathered about them?

How might AR-generated data affect any or all of the arts and other forms of creative expression?

Might some new technical terms of ARt be needed such as “ARformation”, “sensAR” and “stARtegic”?

1. Much of the news and tech media provided extensive coverage of this event. Choosing just one report among many, the January 10, 2019 edition of The New York Times published a roundup and analysis of all of the news and announcements that have occurred in an engaging article with photos entitled CES 2019: It’s the Year of Virtual Assistants and 5G, by Brian X. Chen.

3. During the 2019 Super Bowl 53 played (or, more accurately, snoozed through), on February 3, 2019, there was an ad for a new product called The Mirror. This is a networked full-size wall mirror where users can do their daily workouts in directly in front of it and receive real-time feedback, performance readings, and communications with other users. From this ad and the company’s website, this device appears to be operating upon a similar concept to Amazon’s whereby users are receiving individualized and immediate feedback.

When I first saw an article entitled Fact-Checking Live News In Just a Few Second, by Laine Higgins in the November 24-25, 2018 print edition of The Wall Street Journal (subscription required online), I though the pagination might be in error. The upper left corner showed the number to be “B4”. I think it would have been more accurate to have number the page “B4 and After” because of the coverage of a remarkable new program being developed called Voyc.

At a time of such heightened passions in domestic US and international news, with endless charges and counter-charges of “fake news” and assertions of “real news”, this technology can assess the audio of live news media broadcasts to determine the veracity of statements made within seconds of being spoken.

Someone please boot up John Lennon’s Gimme Some Truth as he passionately protested the need for truth in the world when it was first released on his classic Imagine album in 1971.¹ This still sounds as timely and relevant today as it did 47 years ago, particularly in this new article that, well, sings the praises of this new fact-checking app.

I suggest naming a new category for these programs and services to be called “fact-check tech”. I think it’s kinds catchy.

Let’s focus the specifics of this remarkable report. I highly recommend reading it in its entirety if you have full WSJ.com access. Below I will summarize and annotate it, and then pose some of my own question-checked questions.

Downstreaming

Image from Pixabay.com

The current process of “fact-checking live news” has been slow. Quite often, by the time a human fact-checker has researched and affirmed a disputed claim, subsequently misleading information based upon it has been distributed and “consumed”.

Voyc has the potential to expedite all this. It is being developed by Sparks Grove, the innovation and experience department of a consultancy called North Highland. Part of the development process involved interviewing a large number of “print and broadcast journalists” from the US, UK and Ireland about how to minimize and push back against misinformation as it affects the news.

The software is built upon artificial intelligence technology. It is capable of identifying a “questionable statement” in as quickly as two seconds. The system transcribes live audio and then runs it through a “database of fact” compiled from “verified government courses” and “accredited fact-checking organizations”. In the process, it can:

highlight statements that conflict as highlighted by its vetting process

send an alert to a news producer identifying the conflict, or

contact someone else who can make further inquiries about the assertion in question

This system was conceived by Jack Stenson, Spark Grove’s innovation lead. He said that within the news media, in an attempt to shorten the connection of “people to information”, Voyc is an effort to connect them “to what might be the most accurate truth”. Voyc’s designers were very cautious to avoid dispositively labeling any misleading statements it finds as being neither “true” nor “false”. Mr. Stenson does not want a result that “shuts down the conversation”, but rather, intends for the system to assist in stimulating “debates”.

Currently, there are other similar initiatives to develop similar technologies. These include,

Full Fact, created by a nonprofit in Britain, is applying both AI and machine learning algorithms to improve its tools that identify the “incidence and source of misinformation on television broadcasts”.

Voyc is distinguished from them insofar as it fact-checks news audio in nearly real-time whereas the others do their checks against existing published sources.

Image from Pixabay.com

Upstreaming

Mr. Stenson foresees applications of Voyc by news producers to motivate “presenters” to explore their story topics with follow-up analyses in the forms of :

one-on-one interviews

panel discussions

debates

This software in still in its prototype stage and there is no target date for its introduction into television production facilities. Its developers are working to improving its accuracy when recording and “transcribing idiosyncratic speech patterns”. These include dialects, as well as “ums” and “ahs” ² when people speak.

According to Lucas Graves, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, because of the “nuanced nature” involved in fact-checking (as Voyc is attempting), this process involves both identifying and contextualizing a statement in dispute. This is the critical factor in “verifying claims made on live news”. As broadcasters do not want to appear “partisan” or otherwise making a contemporaneous challenge without all of the facts readily at hand, the real utility of a fact-checking a system will be to challenge a claim in very close proximity to its being spoken and broadcasted.

Looking back in time to dramatize the exciting potential of this forward-looking technology, let’s recall what Edith Anne (played by Lily Tomlin) on Saturday Night Live always said in concluding her appearances when she exclaimed “and that’s the truth“.

“Polygraph”, image by Rodger Bridges

My Questions

What additional features and functionalities should Voyc’s developers consider adding or modifying? What might future releases and upgrades look like?

What data and personal privacy and ethical considerations should Voyc’s designers and programmers take into consideration in their work?

What other market sectors might benefit from fact-check tech such as applying it during expert testimony, education training or government hearings?

Could Voyc be licensed to other developers on a commercial or open source basis?

Can and should Voyc be tweaked to be more industry-specific, knowledge domain-specific or cultural-specific?

1. This was also the opening theme song of the radio show called Idiot’s Delight, hosted for many years by Vin Scelsa who, for nearly five decades, on various commercial, satellite and public stations in New York was a leading figure in rock, progressive and freeform radio.

Every so often, an ad campaign comes along that is strikingly brilliant for its originality, execution, persuasiveness, longevity, humor and pathos. During the mid-1980’s, one of these bright shining examples was the television ads for Bartles & Jaymes Wine Coolers. They consisted of two fictional characters: Frank Bartles, who owned a winery and did all of the talking, and Ed Jaymes, a farmer who never spoke a word but whose deadpan looks were priceless. They traveled across the US to different locations in pursuit of sales, trying to somehow adapt their approaches to reflect the local surroundings. Bartles was very sincere but often a bit naive in his pitches along the way, best exemplified in this ad and another one when they visited New York.

These commercials succeeded beyond all expectations in simultaneously establishing brand awareness, boosting sales and being laugh-out-loud hilarious because Bartles’s and Jaymes’s were such charming, aw-shucks amateurs. In actuality, these ads were deftly conceived and staged by some smart and savvy creatives from the Hal Riney & Partners agency. For further lasting effect, they always had Bartles express his appreciation to the viewers at the end of each spot with his memorable trademark tagline of “Thanks for your support”. These 30-second video gems are as entertaining today as they were thirty years ago.

But those halcyon days of advertising are long gone. The industry’s primary media back then was limited to print, television and radio. Creativity was its cornerstone and the words “data analytics” must have sounded like something actuaries did in a darkened room while contemplating the infinite. (Who knows, maybe it still does to some degree.)

Fast forwarding to 2018, advertising is an utterly different and hyper-competitive sector whose work product is largely splayed across countless mobile and stationary screens on Planet Earth. Expertly chronicling and precisely assaying the transformative changes happening to this sector is an informative and engaging new book entitled Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) [Penguin Press, 2018], by the renowned business author Ken Auletta. Just as a leading ad agency in its day cleverly and convincingly took TV viewers on an endearing cultural tour of the US as we followed the many ad-ventures of Bartles & Jaymes, so too, this book takes its readers on a far-ranging and immersive tour of the current participants, trends, challenges and technologies affecting the ad industry.

A Frenemy of My Frenemy is My Frenemy

Image from Pixabay

This highly specialized world is under assault from a confluence of competitive, online, economic, social and mathematical forces. Many people who work in it are deeply and rightfully concerned about its future and the tenure of their places in it. Auletta comprehensively reports on and assesses these profound changes from deep within the operations of several key constituencies (the “frenemies”, conflating “friend” and “enemy”). At first this might seem a bit too much of “inside baseball” (although the ad pitch remains alive and well), but he quickly and efficiently establishes who’s who and what’s what in today’s morphing ad markets, making this book valuable and accessible to readers both within and outside of this field. It can also be viewed as a multi-dimensional case study of an industry right now being, in the truest sense of the word, disrupted.¹ There is likewise much to learned and considered here by other businesses being buffeted by similar winds.

Frenemies, as thoroughly explored throughout this book, are both business competitors and partners at the same time. They are former and current allies in commerce who concurrently cooperate and compete. Today they are actively infiltrating each other’s markets. The full matrix of frenemies and their threats and relationships to each other includes the interests and perspectives of ad agencies and their clients, social media networks, fierce competition from streamers and original content producers like Netflix², traditional media in transition to digital platforms, consulting companies and, yes, consumers.

Auletta travels several parallel tracks in his reporting. First, he examines the past, present on onrushing future with respect to revenue streams, profits, client bases served, artificial intelligence (AI) driven automation, and the frenemies’ very fluid alliances. Second, he skillfully deploys the investigative journalistic strategy of “following the money” as it ebbs and flows in many directions among the key players. Third, he illuminates the industry’s evolution from Don Draper’s traditional “Mad Men” to 2018’s “math men” who are the data wranglers, analysts and strategists driven by ever more thin-sliced troves of consumer data the agencies and their corporate clients are using to achieve greater accuracy and efficiency in selling their goods and services.

A deep and wide roster of C-level executives from these various groups were interviewed for the book. Chief among them are two ad industry legends who serve as the x and y axes upon which Auletta has plotted a portion of his reporting. One is Martin Sorrell, who was the founder and CEO of WPP, the world’s largest advertising holding company.³ The other is Michael Kassan, the founder and CEO of MediaLink, a multifaceted firm that connects, negotiates and advises on behalf of a multitude of various parties, often competitors in critical matters affecting the ad business. Both of these individuals have significantly shaped modern advertising over many decades and are currently propagating some of the changes spotlighted in the book in trying to keep it vital, relevant and profitable.

Online Privacy v. Online Primacy

“Tug of War”, image by Pixabay

The established tradition of creativity being the primary driver of advertising creation and campaigns has given way to algorithm-driven data analytics. All of the frenemies and a myriad of other sites in many other parsecs of the websphere vacuum up vast amounts of data on users, their online usage patterns, and even go so far as to try to infer their behavioral attributes. This is often combined with additional personal information from third-party sources and data brokers. Armed with all of this data and ever more sophisticated means for sifting and intuiting it, including AI4, the frenemies are devising their campaigns to far more precisely target potential consumers and their cohorts with finely grained customized ads.

The high point of this book is Auletta’s nuanced coverage of the ongoing controversy involving the tension between frenemies using data analytics to increase click-through rates and, hopefully, sales versus respecting the data privacy of people as they traverse the Web. In response to this voracious data collection, millions of users have resisted this intrusiveness by adding free browser extensions such as AdBlock Plus to circumvent online tracking and ad distribution.5 This struggle has produced a slippery slope between the commercial interests of the frenemies and consumers’ natural distaste for advertising, as well as their resentment at having their data co-opted, appropriated and misused without their knowledge or consent. Recently, public and governmental concerns were dramatically displayed in the harsh light of the scandals involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Furthermore, Google and Facebook dominate the vast majority of online advertising traffic, revenues and, most importantly, the vast quantum of user information which ad agencies believe would be particularly helpful to them in profiling and reaching consumers. Nonetheless, they maintain it is highly proprietary to them alone and much of it has not been shared. Frenemies much?

Additional troubling trends for the ad industry are likewise given a thorough 3-D treatment. Auletta returns to the axiom several times that audiences do not want to be interrupted with ads (particularly on their mobile devices). Look no further than the likes of premium and the major streaming services who offer all of their content uninterrupted in its entirety. The growing ranks of content creators they engage know this and prefer it because they can concentrate on their presentations without commercial breaks slicing and dicing their narrative continuity. The still profitable revenue streams flowing from this are based upon the strengths of the subscription model.

Indeed, in certain cases advertising is being simultaneously disrupted and innovated. Some of the main pillars of the media like The New York Times are now expanding their in-house advertising staff and service offerings. They can offer a diversified array of ads and analyses directly to their advertisers. Likewise, engineering-driven operations like Google and Facebook can deploy their talent benches to better target consumers for their advertisers by extracting and applying insights from their massive databases. Why should their clients continue go to the agencies when their ads can be composed and tracked for them directly?

Adapt or Go Home

“Out with the Old, In with the New”, image by Mark

The author presents a balanced although not entirely sanguine view of the ad industry’s changes to maintain its composure and clients in the midst of this storm. The frenemy camps must be willing to make needed and often difficult adjustments to accommodate emerging technological and strategic survival methods. He examines the results of two contemporary approaches to avoiding adblocking apps and more fully engaging very specific audiences. One is called “native advertising“, which involves advertisers producing commercial content and paying for its placement online or in print to promote their own products. Generally, these are formatted and integrated to appear as though they are integrated with a site’s or publication’s regular editorial content but contain a notice that it is, in fact “Advertising”.

However, Auletta believes that the second adaptive mechanism, the online subscription model, will not be much more sustainable beyond its current successes. Consumers are already spending money on their favorite paywalled sites. But it would seem logical that users might not be thus willing to pay for Facebook and others that have always been free. As well, cable’s cord-cutters are continuing to exhibit steady growing in their numbers and their migrations towards streaming services such as Amazon Prime.6

Among the media giants, CBS seems to be getting their adaptive strategies right from continuing to grow multiple revenue streams. They now have the legal rights and financial resources to produce and sell original programming. They have also recently launched original web programming such as Star Trek: Discovery on a commercial-free subscription basis on CBS All Access. This can readily be seen as a challenge to Netflix despite the fact that CBS also providing content to Netflix. Will other networks emulate this lucrative and eyeball attracting model?

As Auletta also concludes, for now at least, consumers as frenemies, appear to be the beneficiaries of all this tumult. They have many device agnostic platforms, pricing options and a surfeit of content from which to choose. They can also meaningfully reduce, although not entirely eliminate, ads following them all over the web and those pesky stealth tracking systems. Whether they collectively can maintain their advantage is subject to sudden change in this environment.

Because of the timing of the book’s completion and publication, the author and publisher should consider including in any subsequent edition the follow-up impacts of Sorrell’s departure from WPP and his new venture (S4 Capital), the effects of the May 2018 implementation of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the progress of any industry or government regulation following the raft of recent massive data breaches and misuses.

Notwithstanding that, however, “Frenemies” fully delivers on all of its book jacket’s promises and premises. It is a clear and convincing case of truth in, well, advertising.

So, how would Frank Bartles and Ed Jaymes 2.0 perceive their promotional travels throughout today’s world? Would their folksy personas play well enough on YouTube to support a dedicated channel for them? Would their stops along the way be Instagram-able events? What would be their reactions when asked to Google something or download a podcast?

Alternatively, could they possibly have been proto-social media influencers who just showed up decades too soon? Nah, not really. Even in today’s digital everything world, Frank and Ed 1.0 still abide. Frank may have also unknowingly planted a potential meme among today’s frenemies with his persistent proclamations of “Thanks for your support”: The 2018 upgrade might well be “Thanks for your support and all of your data”.

September 4, 2018 Update: Today’s edition of The New York Times contains an highly enlightening article directly on point with many of the key themes of Frenemies entitled Amazon Sets Its Sights on the $88 Billion Online Ad Market, by Julie Creswell. The report details Amazon’s significant move into online advertising supported by its massive economic, data analytics, scaling and strategic resources. It comprehensively analyzes the current status and future prospects of the company’s move into direct competition with Google and Facebook in this immense parsec of e-commerce. I highly recommend a click-through and full read of this if you have an opportunity.

July 7, 2019 Update: In another in-depth feature about Martin Sorrell and the impressive and rapid success of his new advertising firm, S4 Capital, see an article in today’s edition of The New York Times entitled The Ad Titan’s Revenge, by David Segal (subscription required). The article was first posted on NYTimes.com on July 1, 2019, under the title “Martin Sorrell Wants to Build a New Ad Empire. Please Don’t Call It Revenge.”

1. The classic work on the causes and effect of market disruptions, the disruptors and those left behind is The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen (HarperBusiness, 2011). The first edition of the book was published in 1992.